Monthly Archives: December 2004

Robin Wright of the Washington Post calls upon the Bush administration to get its act together and take “bold diplomatic action” in the Middle East. “Bold diplomatic action” isn’t exactly an oxymoron — it’s possbile to take such action. Unfortunately, though, in the absence of a prior military victory, bold diplomatic action usually consists of making major and dangerous concessions. Any other course normally will be insufficiently audacious to be »

Novelist Scott Turow thinks that America is “evenly divided” politically. He makes his case in today’s Washington Post in a piece entitled “A Dominant GOP? How So?” The short, and I think compelling, answer is that Republicans control the White House, both Houses of Congress, and a majority of the Governor’s mansions. Turow nonetheless argues that President Bush’s small margin of victory (at least for an incumbent), coupled with his »

Speaking of the spread of democracy, voting is underway in today’s repeat Presidential election in Ukraine. Tune in to Orange Ukraine for up to the minute news. Our friend King Baniain, a former financial adviser to the Ukrainian government, will no doubt be commenting too. UPDATE: Le Sabot Post-Moderne is liveblogging, sort of, from Yushchenko’s headquarters. FURTHER UPDATE (by Deacon): AP reports that all three exit polls tracking the election »

Ralph Peters writes that 2004 was “a vintage year for democracy,” citing developments not only in Afghanistan and Ukraine, but in Australia, Mozambique and elsewhere, including our own Presidential election. The most important election next year, of course, will take place in Iraq: Terrorists will do all they can to disrupt the balloting. Iraqis will die for the crime of casting a vote. There’ll be local corruption, religious influence, ethnic »

Betsy Newmark wrote us to point out that her daughter’s blog had reported on an error committed on Friday by the Washington Post: an error that resulted in this anti-administration headline: “Change Means Fewer Students Will Be Eligible For Pell Grants.” The article claimed that 80,000 to 90,000 low-income students would be knocked out of the Pell program on account of new regulations issued by the Department of Education. Yesterday, »

Is Christmas under attack by militant secularists? Well, sure. As part of their broader effort to marginalize and delegitimize Christianity, the secularists have done what they can to attack Christianity’s most popular holiday. We’ve all heard about this year’s “outrages” on the part of school districts, local government units and chain merchants–although it does seem that we hear about the same handful of incidents over and over. While thinking about »

Don Hewitt is the creator of the “Sixty Minutes.” He “stepped down” as its executive producer in June of this year. Asked about bloggers during a panel discussion at the Kennedy School, televised by C-SPAN, Hewitt responded that bloggers are “great.” He described them as “our new fact-checkers,” adding that they will force the networks to be more acccurate in their reporting. »

Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post presents the military and moral case against Isreal’s pullout from Gaza. On the military side, she cites the former commander of the Israeli Defense Force’s Southern Command, who says that the fence around Gaza has thwarted about 30 percent of the unsuccessful Gaza-based terrorist attacks on Israel, while IDF operations inside the Gaza Strip are responsible for stopping the other 70 percent. Once Israel »

We have written a couple of times about the accusations of complicity with terrorists in Iraq which were made recently by Belmont Club and others. The issue relates to the shocking photo, recently published by the AP, showing three terrorists in the act of murdering two Iraqi election workers on a street during daylight. The photographer was obviously within a few yards of the scene of the murder, which raises »

We’ve been beating up on the Associated Press lately, and rightly so, but let’s not forget those miscreants at AFP, the French news service. Today they had a brief picture story on a visit by actress Angelina Jolie and her young son to “Palestinian orphans living in refugee camps in Lebanon.” AFP explains that Jolie “wanted to meet refugee children and introduce her Cambodian-born son, Maddox, to those less advantaged »

This ambitious piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht examines “the struggle for the Middle East.” Specifically, Gerecht considers the status of Iraq, Iran, al Qaeda, our overall effort to bring democracy to the region, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The whole thing is worth reading, but the “must read” portion pertains to Iraq on which, Gerecht says, most of the rest probably depends. Gerecht’s view is that “post-Saddam Iraq is not a »

Reader Brian Mattson has alerted us to an astonishing eyewitness report by Captain Dan Mattson (his brother) deriving from Secretary Rumsfeld’s in-theater visit. Today Secretary Rumsfeld visited a military hospital just two miles from the dining hall tent in Mosul where the huge explosion occurred as staff were sitting down for lunch Tuesday. Captain Mattson reports from the hospital: It’s Christmas Eve, though it didn’t feel like it. There are »

Long-time readers of this site know that the Associated Press is not a reliable news source. One of the most blatant lies of the 2004 campaign was when AP reporter Scott Lindlaw, a long-time Democratic partisan, falsely reported that a crowd of Republicans in Wisconsin booed when President Bush announced that Bill Clinton had just been hospitalized with a heart problem. We publicized this story here, as did others in »

Hugh Hewitt provides a Cook’s tour of the blogosphere and previews his forthcoming book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World (shipping imminently from Amazon) in this morning’s post. UPDATE by HINDROCKET: My copy of Hugh’s book arrived in the mail today. From a quick skim, it looks great. Hugh documents the rise of the blogosphere, gives a riveting account of the role blogs played in the 2004 »

Reader Kevin “Hognose” O’Brien comments on our post “Eyeless at the Associated Press”: FWIW, there is no question among the troops that the AP’s participation in the murders of the Iraqi election officials was anything but witting and consensual. Bear in mind that there is significant prior experience with specific journalists participating in terrorist crimes, as this man did: — Paris Match spent a week riding with a Ba’athist SAM »

Michelle Malkin points out that the attack on Christmas in America is “is a mere skirmish” compared to the bloody, repressive war against Christians that is taking place in the Middle East and China. And Jeff Jarvis has argued that this bloody repressive war supports his view that our disagreements here in the U.S. over the place of religion represent “a fight for the sake of a fight.” Jarvis’ advise »